Koyoi koso namida no kawa ni iru chidori nakite kaeru to kimi wa shirazu ya

English Translation

Tonight of all nights
a plover that has waded
into the river
of tears goes crying homeward
And you — do you not know it

Meaning

Tonight of all nights, a plover that has waded into the river of tears goes home crying. And you — do you not know it?

Commentary

76 The River of Tears

Minamoto no Yoshitane was at the Katsura Princess's house when her mother, the Lady of the Bedchamber, heard of it and had the doors barred; so he stood outside all night in his misery, and as he was at last leaving he threw this poem in through a gap in the gate. The prose says no more, and the section consists of this single poem.
The Katsura Princess lived at Katsura and has poems in the twentieth and twenty-sixth sections. Minamoto no Yoshitane was the man visiting her, and appears again in the seventy-seventh section. The Lady of the Bedchamber was her mother.
The setting is the gate of the princess's house, at dawn, after a night spent shut out.
What prompted the poem was the mother's barring of the doors and the night he spent standing outside. The poem was thrown in through a gap in the gate.
The section ends with the poem; no reply and no later event is recorded.

The emphatic particle in the first line sets this night apart from all others.
A plover has waded into a river of tears — the bird is one of the waterside, long in poetry for its call.
The verb for its crying is also the verb for a person weeping, so that a plover going home calling and a man going home in tears are one word.
The closing asks whether she knows. She may well not know that he stood at her gate all night, and the question fits that exactly. Throwing the poem through the gap is the only means of telling her that he has.

Source

Yamato Monogatari

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